Halleck's New English Literature eBook

He resembles the Elizabethans in preferring magnificent
to commonplace images. It has been often noticed
that if he essays to write of buildings in general,
he prefers to describe palaces. His knowledge
of the intellectual side of human nature is especially
remarkable, but, unlike Shakespeare, Bacon never drops
his plummet into the emotional depths of the soul.

THE NON-DRAMATIC POETRY—­LYRICAL VERSE

A Medium of Artistic Expression.—­No age
has surpassed the Elizabethan in lyrical poems, those
“short swallow flights of song,” as Tennyson
defines them. The English Renaissance, unlike
the Italian, did not achieve great success in painting.
The Englishman embodied in poetry his artistic expression
of the beautiful. Many lyrics are merely examples
of word painting. The Elizabethan poet often began
his career by trying to show his skill with the ingenious
and musical arrangement of words, where an Italian
would have used color and drawing on an actual canvas.

We have seen that in the reign of Henry VIII.
Wyatt and Surrey introduced into England from Italy
the type of lyrical verse known as the sonnet.
This is the most artificial of lyrics, because its
rules prescribe a length of exactly fourteen lines
and a definite internal structure.

The sonnet was especially popular with Elizabethan
poets. In the last ten years of the sixteenth
century, more than two thousand sonnets were written.
Even Shakespeare served a poetic apprenticeship by
writing many sonnets as well as semi-lyrical poems,
like Venus and Adonis.

We should, however, remember that the sonnet is only
one type of the varied lyric expression of the age.
Many Elizabethan song books show that lyrics were
set to music and used on the most varied occasions.
There were songs for weddings, funerals, dances, banquets,—­songs
for the tinkers, the barbers, and other workmen.
If modern readers chance to pick up an Elizabethan
novel, like Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde
(1590), they are surprised to find that prose will
not suffice for the lover, who must “evaporate”
into song like this:—­

“Love in my bosom like a bee,
Doth suck his sweet.
Now with his wings he plays with me,
Now with his feet.”

There are large numbers of Elizabethan lyrics apparently
as spontaneous and unfettered as the song of the lark.
The seeming artlessness of much of this verse should
not blind us to the fact that an unusual number of
poets had really studied the art of song.

Love Lyrics.—­The subject of the Elizabethan
sonnets is usually love. Sir Philip Sidney wrote
many love sonnets, the best of which is the one beginning:—­

“With how sad steps. O Moon,
thou climb’st the Skies!”

Edmund Spencer composed fifty-eight sonnets in one
year to chronicle his varied emotions as a lover.
We may find among Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets
some of the greatest love lyrics in the language, such,
for instance, as CXVI., containing the lines:—­